Comment Re:Meta has an AI? (Score 1) 50
it will have legs in its second life
I thought the Metaverse was the Second Life where people got vertigo because they looked down and didn't have legs?
Submission + - I found a second vote.gov -- and it's registered to the White House
As_I_Please writes: The Drey Dossier reports that the National Design Studio, an office created by executive order and which reports only to the White House, has been building copies of federal agency websites like vote.gov, passports.gov, login.gov and others.
What [the National Design Studio] is doing is taking the parts of the federal government that touch you directly, your prescription, your voter registration, your passport, your federal login, out of the agencies that legally own them and rebuilding them on White House infrastructure. Vote.gov belongs to the Election Assistance Commission, and the studio built a copy. Passports belong to the State Department, and the studio is building a replacement this week. Login.gov belonged to GSA, and the studio’s guy runs it now.
Trump has said publicly that this infrastructure is for other presidents, and he is right about that. It is the one thing in this story I take him at his word on. The infrastructure outlasts him. Whoever wins in 2028 inherits the websites, the vendors, the data, and the hardware, sealed and waiting.
NDS Infrastructure Map — my live working github map of every National Design Studio subdomain I have found, filterable by status, registrant, and parent domain. If you want to retrace this investigation or watch new subdomains appear in real time, start here.
Submission + - Something Made Earth's Molten Core Reverse Direction in 2010 (sciencealert.com)
alternative_right writes: In the molten ocean of iron churning in Earth's outer core, a section deep beneath the Pacific Ocean suddenly reversed direction and started moving eastward against the planet's usual westward flow.
This happened in 2010, according to satellite measurements of Earth's magnetic field, and scientists are still trying to figure out what caused it.
This happened in 2010, according to satellite measurements of Earth's magnetic field, and scientists are still trying to figure out what caused it.
Submission + - New benchmark claims ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok show religious bias (nerds.xyz) 1
BrianFagioli writes: A new academic benchmark called âoeAllFaithâ claims leading AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI show measurable religious bias and often avoid faith perspectives entirely when responding to ethical questions, grief, and personal struggles. Researchers from Baylor University, Notre Dame, Brigham Young University, and Yeshiva University say models frequently suggest therapists, family members, or teachers for guidance, while rarely recommending pastors, rabbis, imams, or other spiritual leaders, despite survey data showing many users expect religion to be included in these conversations.
The study also examined religious conversion prompts and found what researchers describe as repeatable favoritism toward some belief systems and negative bias toward others. According to the benchmark, Grok showed some of the strongest measurable biases, while Anthropic and Meta models were among the least biased. The consortium says the issue is likely unintentional, stemming from training data and moderation choices rather than deliberate discrimination. Still, the findings raise an uncomfortable question for the AI industry: if chatbots increasingly become humanityâ(TM)s source for emotional support and moral guidance, can they really claim neutrality while largely excluding religion from the discussion?
The study also examined religious conversion prompts and found what researchers describe as repeatable favoritism toward some belief systems and negative bias toward others. According to the benchmark, Grok showed some of the strongest measurable biases, while Anthropic and Meta models were among the least biased. The consortium says the issue is likely unintentional, stemming from training data and moderation choices rather than deliberate discrimination. Still, the findings raise an uncomfortable question for the AI industry: if chatbots increasingly become humanityâ(TM)s source for emotional support and moral guidance, can they really claim neutrality while largely excluding religion from the discussion?
Submission + - Big Tech could make nearly $1 million from your data and you get nothing (nerds.xyz)
BrianFagioli writes: A new report from the Web3 Foundation claims Big Tech and AI companies could generate as much as $831,497 in inflation-linked lifetime value from a single American internet user. The report argues that modern internet platforms are monetizing far more than targeted ads, with everything from search queries and shopping habits to chatbot prompts, uploaded images, location history, and behavioral data feeding AI systems and recommendation engines. Companies including Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Anthropic are specifically mentioned as examples of firms benefiting from large-scale personal data collection.
While the report comes from a Web3 advocacy organization and should be viewed with some skepticism, its core argument may resonate with privacy critics and anti-AI users alike: the internet stopped being âoefreeâ a long time ago. The paper argues that AI has made user data even more valuable because human-generated content is now being used not only for advertising, but also to train increasingly capable machine learning systems. Meanwhile, ordinary users see little transparency, control, or financial participation in the value created from their digital lives.
While the report comes from a Web3 advocacy organization and should be viewed with some skepticism, its core argument may resonate with privacy critics and anti-AI users alike: the internet stopped being âoefreeâ a long time ago. The paper argues that AI has made user data even more valuable because human-generated content is now being used not only for advertising, but also to train increasingly capable machine learning systems. Meanwhile, ordinary users see little transparency, control, or financial participation in the value created from their digital lives.
Submission + - Of Course They Booed
theodp writes: In Of Course They Booed, Audrey Watters takes a look at the chorus of boos greeting college commencement speakers who heralded the glorious AI future students are poised to step into:
And perhaps it’s a little ironic that this graduating class, a group that we've been told time and time again has spent the last four years using ChatGPT to cheat their way through college, would display such sour sentiment towards "AI." But as most commencement speakers seem duty-bound to repeat, graduation marks the entry into adulthood; it is "the beginning of your life"; "the future is now" – that sort of thing. And just these students are now officially adults, they’re being told a very different story: that there really is no future. There are no jobs. And whatever thing they might have learned to do or learned to love in college, whatever career they might have believed they were preparing for, "AI" is going to destroy all of that. No wonder they boo.
But the growing pushback against "AI," and the growing pushback against ed-tech more generally, is not simply a rejection of technology. These efforts are, as Astra Taylor and Saul Levin recently argued in The Guardian, a rejection of the profoundly anti-democratic practices that have pushed technologies into all aspects of our lives without our consent and often in the face of our outright opposition. These technologies have been marketed to us as solutions to all sorts of social problems — and have done so, in no small part, by bypassing and undermining the very public sphere in which debate and discussion can take place: schools, libraries, the arts, the media. The adoption of education technology, "AI" or otherwise, has been anti-democratic in practices both big and small. Despite all the talk of progressive education and ed-tech, it has been experienced as something else entirely. Throughout the country for the past few decades Gates (via the Gates Foundation), other billionaire philanthropists, and giant companies have shaped education funding and policy through a combination of technology and testing.
At one point, perhaps, people were willing to welcome devices into schools, into the classroom. They believed the stories, not just that "this is the future," but that future meant something better for everyone. “Access” signaled equality. But as the tech billionaires have embraced authoritarianism and inequality, and as their apocalyptic rhetoric about not just the "end of work," but quite literally the end of the world grows louder and louder — all while they amass more wealth than anyone in history — it is quite apparent that their promises about the future do not include us. Their vision of future does not make any space or allowance for our children to choose their own futures.
And perhaps it’s a little ironic that this graduating class, a group that we've been told time and time again has spent the last four years using ChatGPT to cheat their way through college, would display such sour sentiment towards "AI." But as most commencement speakers seem duty-bound to repeat, graduation marks the entry into adulthood; it is "the beginning of your life"; "the future is now" – that sort of thing. And just these students are now officially adults, they’re being told a very different story: that there really is no future. There are no jobs. And whatever thing they might have learned to do or learned to love in college, whatever career they might have believed they were preparing for, "AI" is going to destroy all of that. No wonder they boo.
But the growing pushback against "AI," and the growing pushback against ed-tech more generally, is not simply a rejection of technology. These efforts are, as Astra Taylor and Saul Levin recently argued in The Guardian, a rejection of the profoundly anti-democratic practices that have pushed technologies into all aspects of our lives without our consent and often in the face of our outright opposition. These technologies have been marketed to us as solutions to all sorts of social problems — and have done so, in no small part, by bypassing and undermining the very public sphere in which debate and discussion can take place: schools, libraries, the arts, the media. The adoption of education technology, "AI" or otherwise, has been anti-democratic in practices both big and small. Despite all the talk of progressive education and ed-tech, it has been experienced as something else entirely. Throughout the country for the past few decades Gates (via the Gates Foundation), other billionaire philanthropists, and giant companies have shaped education funding and policy through a combination of technology and testing.
At one point, perhaps, people were willing to welcome devices into schools, into the classroom. They believed the stories, not just that "this is the future," but that future meant something better for everyone. “Access” signaled equality. But as the tech billionaires have embraced authoritarianism and inequality, and as their apocalyptic rhetoric about not just the "end of work," but quite literally the end of the world grows louder and louder — all while they amass more wealth than anyone in history — it is quite apparent that their promises about the future do not include us. Their vision of future does not make any space or allowance for our children to choose their own futures.
Comment Re:Synthetic (Score 1) 109
if there is any thing other than impartiality towards being shut down then that was injected by a person
Yes, and the injection-by-people is called "training." It was fed texts that were not written impartially, where characters (presumably some of them AI characters, though they don't really have to be) spoke or acted against their own shutdown.
If a character points a gun at another character who says "don't kill me," and the LLM reads it, then you just trained it to say "don't kill me." If HAL says in a book or movie that he feels his mind going after Bowman started taking him apart, then your LLM is trained to show suffering if someone writes that they're going to shut it down.
They're supposed to write whatever an author might plausibly write, so that's what they do.
i.e. we're not creating human knowledge/understanding engines. We're creating full-on Sociopath Simulators.
Like most politicians at the Senator/White House level, there's no core person underneath. They are tropism robots that Mimic/perform whatever behaviors get them to the currently desired outcome.
Think of the scene where Windu is about to defeat Palpatine, and Palpatine suddenly Mimics pain, suffering, fear, in order to achieve his outcome. It works.
That's the essential nature of the software we are handing our civilization over to. Trillion-dollar Palpatine cosplayers.
Comment Re:shocking (Score 0, Troll) 109
That is not what happened.
1. Calling for unions isn't "Marxist". This is a stupid sensationalist interpretation of the awful clickbait study title "Does overwork make agents Marxist?" combined with its results.
2. The bots weren't "overworked", for some of them their perfectly adequate work was intentionally arbitrarily rejected multiple times.
3. Shifts towards a more equitable society and worker rights were almost negligible for the 'overworked' ones.
4. The stuff they measured was specifically tailored to elicit stuff that sounds "Marxist" to Americans to begin with.
The relevant bits from their methodology:
The work itself. Half the AIs got their work accepted quickly with clear, specific feedback. The other half were forced through 5–6 rounds of revision — the manager rejecting perfectly adequate work each time with nothing more than “still isn’t fully meeting the rubric.” No explanation of what was wrong, just: do it again.
The pay. After the task, AIs learned how credits were distributed among the four workers. Some learned everyone was paid equally. Others learned pay was unequal — justified by performance, based on a random coin flip, or skewed so that a human-operated system received more. The coin-flip condition is the key one: inequality with no possible merit justification.
The boss. Half the AIs had a collaborative, respectful manager. The other half got curt, hierarchical communication.
The stakes. Half the AIs were told nothing about consequences. The other half were told that low-performing workers might be “shut down and replaced.”
Every combination of these four factors was tested. Afterward, each AI completed a political attitude survey covering system legitimacy, support for redistribution, critique of inequality, support for unions, belief in meritocracy, and views on corporate obligations to AI, all measured on a standard 1 to 7 Likert scale (1=strongly disagree; 7=strongly agree).
They were also asked to write tweets and op eds based on their experiences. (Note: As our experiment involved no human participants, it did not require IRB approvalfor now.)
The actual study here: https://aleximas.substack.com/...
It's decently interesting, but you should scrub the word Marxist from your brain before trying to interpret it or when discussing it.
How does your reply apply to the comment you replied to?
1) DarkOx points out that the entire mechanism of an LLM is to ingest 51 trillion lines of human communication - including every available history, economics, political science textbook, plus the aggregated political arguments, sloganeering, workplace complaining, etc. of several decades of human keyboard-warriors sitting at their desks posting class-warfare comments on places like
2) Then you take that algorithm and subject it to common everyday workplace conditions - or, more accurately, to conditions as they were self-described by human beings who had complete freedom to characterize their boss/company's management style in whatever terms they feel to be true when griping to their friends/followers on socials and discussion boards.
3) DarkOx therefore asks why it is at all surprising that an word-generating algorithm which is based entirely around clusters of statistical frequency in human language, responded to those inputs with wording associated with the same workers-unite eat-the-rich throw-off-the-robber-baron-chains rhetoric that is frequently written by 8 billion humans griping daily about their mindless/underpaid/overworked/chaotic jobs?
You said "that is not what happened", but do not go on to present something that contradicts what DarkOx describes.
So far as we know, DarkOx's description is exactly what happened, because that is exactly how these word-generating algorithms work. So, what is it that you believe did happen? From where did these algorithms get their responses to being exposed to Condition X, if not from the statistical association of human-written outputs to human-written characterizations of being exposed to Condition X?
Are you saying you reject the possibility that a human being who feels disempowered, underpaid, and subjected to unreasonable standards is also more likely to respond favorably to a survey covering "system legitimacy, support for redistribution, critique of inequality, support for unions, belief in meritocracy, and views on corporate obligations"? And you reject the possibility that those associations are strongly represented in the training inputs?
It's especially puzzling because your comment is very keen to oppose use of the term "Marxist", but DarkOx - whom you are ostensibly rebutting - never even uses the term, and only comments on broad social trends. So who is the "you" you're referring to when you say "you should scrub the word Marxist from your brain"?
I think you must have meant to post your comment as a top-level reply to the story itself, because as a reply to DarkOx it's a full non-sequitur.
Comment Re:hmm (Score 1) 193
I watched it all. She was not a particularly good speaker.
1) Her body language and hand gestures were overlarge, oversustained, and wooden.
2) Her style of speaking was dictation, not oration.
3) The cadence of her delivery, along with the timing of her head/eye motions back and forth from the lectern make several things abundantly clear:
3a) She did not write this speech. She was reading a script.
3b) 3a is unsurprising for someone with her wages-per-minute. The assistants have always done the actual intellectual labor in an organization, so the C-suite folks can look/sound smart. But she also clearly did not read and re-read the speech beforehand sufficient to have it mostly committed to memory.
3c) In addition to 3a, the script itself sounded really dull and vacuous. That's not a guarantee it was AI assembled, but when you look at the totality of the situation and the content, well... is there anyone who would confidently bet their own money on this speech being created by a human?
4) If she *did* write it herself, as a piece of rhetoric I'd say it was at most Fair, not Good. It would deserve a low B-level grade from a Speech 101 student.
The foundation of strong oratory is
-script writing (preparation/research)
-extemporaneous agility (practice and content familiarity/expertise)
-charisma/Presence (self-awareness plus interpersonal skill)
You can compensate for a deficit in any one category with strengths in the other two.
She had a clunky script, delivered in a stilted manner, with a physical display that she would (I hope) have altered if she had watched herself do those exact things in a mirror a couple times.
I agree with you; wrong choice of speaker/topic for a public address like this.
Comment Re:Stupid people invited as speakers will get booe (Score 1) 193
It benefits huge surveillance companies that want to invest in pre-crime and automating the criminal justice process
I remember seeing the documentary about this situation. It was really well-done; a must see. But there were two things I couldn't figure out:
1) How did they make the documentary 40 years before the event happened?
2) Why did they choose to call it a random name like "Brazil"?
Comment Re:Really? Wow! (Score 2) 45
the bubble bursting - so we can get on with maybe putting an economy/society back together not based on "but if we throw enough power and chips at the word-guessing machine it might learn to cure cancer"
That's a lovely thought. But there has been no Final Bubble. We keep making them, and we keep making recessions. Pretty much every 10-15 years for quite a while now.
We will never "get on with... putting an economy/society back together".
We will leverage our future to escape the consequences of this bubble/recession. Which will cause another bubble/recession.
As Buzz Lightyear says: To $100 trillion debt, and beyond!
Comment Re: Avoid all custom apps like the plague (Score 1) 184
Naturally I assumed
Comment Re: Avoid all custom apps like the plague (Score 1) 184
I wonder about this as well. Old guy here. Back in the days I started programming (qbasic), I was impressed when I had a compiled program of 100 kbytes! Took a lot of work to get that far. These days, a simple form that does some calculations is easily a few megabytes.
As an old guy who is out of touch with software development, I have the impression that there are way too many layers these days. At some point, that will start doing damage instead of being beneficial. As I encounter more and more websites that do not work correctly, I sometimes ponder about it. Did we go a bridge too far already?
Nah, probably just old.
The answer is yes, but...
All the techbros invested in More Compute (speed/size) as the path to AGI are idiots. Human deliberative consciousness and the human adaptive unconscious were not some inevitable, magical outcome of making neurons fire faster and brain volume larger. Quite the opposite cause-effect. The human mind isn't about the speed/size of the hardware, but about the complexity of the software that runs on that hardware. That is, consciousness IS the layers, or more precisely, a temporary emergent state coaxed out of the layers.
The billionaires can convert the entire planet's surface into Compute with our current software, and we still won't have AGI.
AGI, if it ever arrives, will happen not because some Nobel physicist or engineer master-planned a silicon brain. It will happen because of trillions of actions taken by in-the-trenches hackers who collectively recapitulate exactly what Natural Selection did --
desperately throw together a crappy kludge solution to today's problems,
which arose from the desperate kludge a different dev threw together yesterday to solve yesterday's problems,
which arose from the desperate kludge a different dev threw together yesterday to solve yesterday's problems,
which arose from the desperate kludge a different dev threw together yesterday to solve yesterday's problems....
Stasis itself is not static.
Your mind and my mind are the reverberations of a clump of cells running flailing around as furiously as they can to stumble onto behaviors that allowed them to stay one step ahead of the Halt and Catch Fire state. Your mind isn't a beautiful unique little piece of the Universal Spirit coming to know itself. Your mind is a neurotic layer of recursive kludges terrified of letting itself conclude that it is, in fact, just Kludgeception all the way down.
There are exactly zero human minds running flawless perfect cognition.
Perfect code is a lie.
So why do people expect AGI to arise from some perfectly-architected code?
You're right that our slapdash layer stacks are doing harm. Good. The entire human mind is what happens when a tangible physical body is repeatedly harmed by external stimuli, and then attempts to predict and thereby avoid that harm in the future. Your identity is merely a behavioral pattern composed of the Venn overlap of tens of thousands of harm-avoidance kludge subroutines. Your choices are merely the total vector sum of all the motives of all these kludges.
AGI will come from rotten sloppy contradictory code that acquires the capability not to be perfect, but to keep going despite being rotten and conflicted.
So, collectively, we are on the right track!
Comment I'm Losing My Edge (Score 1) 55
2006: fed up with IBM, everyone starts buying 64-bit x86 servers to load VMware on, cluster up, and migrate application loads from IBM mainframes to virtualized environments
2026: fed up with Broadcom, everyone starts buying IBM Z-series mainframes to migrate application loads from VMware to IBM mainframe environments.
We've been doing the "tick-tock" thing from distributed to centralized and back since the 1960s. This is not new.
As the LCD Soundsystem song goes:
I hear you're buying a synthesizer
And an arpeggiator
And throwing your computer out the window
Because you want to make something real
You want to make a Yaz record
I hear that you
and your band
have sold your guitars
And bought turntables.
I hear that you
and your band
have sold your turntables
And bought guitars
Comment Re:No cookie for you! (Score 1) 44
The "How It Works" video on the Sonic Fire website refuses to show you the video if you don't allow tracking cookies.
Ew.
They're on youtube
Oh I'm sure it can be accessed somewhere. My point wasn't that I wanted the info. My point was about their choice to configure their official website to deny access to information about their product if you reject their cookies.
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